Families: Jihadi John’s death is ‘small solace’

The USA military is “reasonably certain” that an American drone strike in Syria has killed the Islamic State executioner known as “Jihadi John”, an official said on Friday.

But a USA official said Thursday’s attack in the town of Raqqa, Islamic State’s de facto capital, probably killed Emwazi and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group, quoted sources in Raqqa as saying he had been blown to pieces.

Emwazi was being driven in a auto, and he and a driver are the men believed to have been killed, Warren said.

An airstrike targeting the British IS militant known as “Jihadi John” has been carried out in Syria – and the U.S. is “99% sure we got him”.

Officials say US forces picked up on him and saw him move to the location of the targeted airstrike.

Kerry said, “We are still assessing the results of this strike, but the terrorists associated with Daesh need to know this – your days are numbered, and you will be defeated”, referring to another name for the terrorist group.

In all of the execution videos the masked man can be heard speaking with a distinctive London accent and several surviving hostages have described him as a sadistic captor.

Emwazi was born in Kuwait, but grew up in the United Kingdom and was a British citizen.

“The intelligence indicators that we had gave us great confidence that this individual was Jihadi John and when the opportunity presented itself – with the opportunity for minimal civilian casualties – we took the shot”, Warren said.

Civil liberties advocates have criticized any official British attempt to kill Emwazi as possibly unlawful, in a debate that paralleled the criticism over the Obama administration’s decision to target and kill Anwar al-Awlaki, a USA citizen, in Yemen in 2011.

He first came into prominence in August 2014, when ISIS released a video in which American journalist James Foley was shown reading a statement criticising President Obama and the American military operation against the Islamic State in Iraq.

“It is a very small solace to learn that Jihadi John may have been killed by the USA government”, John and Diane Foley, the parents of James Foley, said in a written statement Friday.